If you’re a small business owner and are looking to make it big in the market, you’ll need to strategically plan your approach. It can be a challenging task for new CEOs without a lot of business experience, and taking the wrong strategies can often result in a devastating loss of business. This article lists some growth hacks that new CEOs should keep in mind when strategizing their business scaling plans.
- Build a Team That You Can Grow With and Invest in Them
Team building is often regarded as the most crucial investment in any business because your team makes up your business’s very foundation. Hence, your team should be able to work seamlessly with each other, trust each other, and remain motivated enough to meet your day to day, dynamic business goals successfully. Thus, before hiring, you must profile prospective candidates and evaluate whether they’d be a good fit for the team you envisioned working for your company.
Building the team only accounts for half the work, and many CEOs often treat their employees as mere workhorses rather than integral parts of their company. As a CEO, you should show that you care for your employees and invest in their benefits whenever you can. It is crucial because it motivates them and creates a driving force to keep your team happy. Remember, a motivated team can drive profits up by 50 percent.
- Automate or Outsource What You Can
Businesses nowadays often outsource or automate tasks that aren’t essential to be completed by their employees. Instead of performing these tasks manually, they can focus on other aspects of their business. There are many compelling reasons to do so. These include:
- Control operational costs,
- Increase accountability,
- Increase multi-department visibility,
- Optimize work distribution among in-house employees, and
- Outsourcing work when a company may not have adequate resources.
Tasks like social media posting and data pulling can be automated easily with the available technology. At the same time, you can hire external agencies to outsource for payroll administration, content creation, or IT management.
- Don’t Take Shortcuts
A common mistake new CEOs make is to put a bandaid on seemingly unimportant issues within your company with the intention of fixing them later on. However, these issues are often forgotten with time until they come back to haunt your growth progress. The problems here refer to anything that might be detrimental to your company’s success or profitability, like work ethics and integrity, service quality, workplace culture, etc.
Let’s take the example of service quality. Often, due to reasons like aggressive deadlines or logistic difficulties, you might decide to compromise on your service quality instead of analyzing and immediately working out a solution for those business challenges. However, doing so sets a precedent that your company is willing to cut corners to meet business challenges, resulting in the erosion of your brand value and a loss of business in the future. Remember, “there are no shortcuts to success.” Your business is no exception to that.
- Scale by Setting Realistic, Data-Driven Goals
Setting reasonable goals is essential for every business. They define clear-cut objectives that your company should accomplish to generate more profits. However, your business goals should always be data-driven and should be determined using proper analytics and mathematical tools.
It is crucial because it prevents the emergence of unrealistic goals or, even worse, arbitrary goals that might be detrimental to your company’s profits. Unrealistic goals can often weigh down on your team motivation and promote a “crunch” culture leading to the dilution of work quality. In contrast, arbitrary ones often result in significant wastage of time and business resources.
A common acronym used to define a successful business goal is S.M.A.R.T which stands for:
- Specific – It should not be confused with long-term plans. It should be concrete and well defined.
- Measurable – Its outcome should be measurable by dollars or percentages.
- Action-oriented – It should lay down the objectives to be accomplished by your team(s).
- Realistic – It should be data-driven.
- Time-specific – It should have a proper deadline(s).
Ideas for Growth Arise From Experience or by Being Well-Informed
It is often said that your business will grow as you gain more experience as a CEO. However, most Fortune 500 CEOs did not wait around for a new business idea to pop into their heads. They scaled their startups by being well-informed about prospective strategies that can generate more profits and the common mistakes that can hinder them. It is vital to have a base understanding of how you can formulate a long-term business plan and avoid common mistakes along the way.
